| in america volume 24 part 5 - 2012 april-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
April 1 2012 So restless about food. Going low carb quickly solves pain and stiffness as well as podge but I don't want to eat anything in the fridge. It's partly that none of it's organic maybe? - What I do want to eat is the stuff that made me gain 10 pounds since I've been here, bran muffins with raisins and diced ginger and a lot of butter, and baked custard. Or French bread sweet butter and cheese. Baked potatoes. - Or maybe it's cooking badly? Horrible cheese omelette this morning, horrible baked salmon yesterday. Horrible green Mac apples. Baked Granny Smith are good. Somehow don't want salad because it's cold and a lot of standing in the kitchen to make. Slogging at Anthony all day. I think I've done what I can. Got the first paragraph right, said what I know about our difference. Chose what to ignore, which was hard because I don't understand it all. 2 Monday morning, last packet reply sent, I have a clear week, restless. Drive somewhere, is all I can think of. - Flash of pink in the pasture grass. I back up to look again. Get out of the jeep and crawl under the wire. It's a stalk of clear pink mallow-like flowers, just the one stalk coming up from a flat rosette of round scalloped leaves. It's checkerbloom, I think. Barbara Kereszkury and I leaning on her silver car with Water Sampling Service on the doors. First smart person I've met here. In her 80s, small silver and lapis earrings in the shape of turtles. Good face. She asked at the last moment what kind of Indian I am. 3 Three kinds of lupin, a lot of dark purple milk vetch, Arizona lupin, stinging lupin, and a smaller darker intense one. Little white forget-me-not? Lots of mustard coming. That common yellow rolled trumplet. First morning I didn't need to make a fire. Sat briefly on the new bench. 4 Grim, dull, exasperated by pain, sameness, aloneness, daily wastedness. - Borrego Springs later in the morning. Yellow on the fields, drifted into hollows. Far hillsides sometimes grey blue of ceanothus climbing vertical cuts. Here in town the palo verde in early bloom. - Lost the roadrunner hat somehow so here is a hawk, have I upgraded. New pyjamas. 5 So extraordinarily unmotivated. Why has this adventure taken such a sour turn. Is it since Tom chopped me. I sometimes think of Marianne Williamson saying that when a woman doesn't love she can lose her will to live. - There I go to look for Williamson and find AG20 and am instantly sweet on myself. What is it about the smell of creosote. I picked a bunch and have it on the mantle. Every once in a while it gives off a scent I sniff with avidity. 6 Friday. Dim sun with a rare breeze. The oak is looking so shabby, the hanging limb, a lot of stubs, and now it's unleafed like an old animal with mangy fur. The oak below it must be younger, it is not as broad and still in thick leaf though this seems to be the leaf-drop season for the Engelmans, which all look dull against the green. The air has been thick these past days, mountains whited I don't know why. Last night there was a full moon illuminating a ground mist almost to the window, a blue glow when I'd turned off the lights. Four days till packets again. I will try to be briefer and get them done in a week. old line survivors like Edith S and D Richardson have learned to write But then the editor's notes quote a nasty review he'd written much earlier. Such as I am, you have considerably made me. DP to EP Vivica Genoux looks the way I'd like to. She's tall and broad-shouldered, has a perfect round bosom, a sort of Cherokee look. A blog critic complained that she moves her mouth oddly but that's what holds me most about her, the way she trumpets her lips forward or holds them pushed forward but half closed - like an orchid? some flower - as she articulates precise dark shakes. She's a goddess vision. Statuesque and confidently animal - what he didn't like about her mouth is that the strong flex is a bit chimp? Or horse. In the tempest passages she crouches and wrings, tosses from the knees up. I don't like to watch the soprano because she's scrawny and little and just jerks her shoulders up and down, a vision of starved femininity whereas Vivica with her strong Alaskan arms looks like the queen of archaic Greece. She's always in minutely immaculate time. The soprano is not. She has also made a couple of very tiny intonation mistakes, which I don't think the soprano does. Her voice is molasses with a gold shine where it's stretched. They are perfect together, two women side by side in dark dresses with bare arms performing exquisitely skilled parallel scribbles of sound. - It's all unsayable. She lays her head to the side when she listens. 10 July 1909. "'You are triste, Little Brother?' he asked three days ago." "Anything that demands only partial attention is useless for developing a vortex in time it would incapacitate one for serious creation of any sort." EP to DP on embroidery. almost exuberant kindliness. And Ezra, as I had cause later to find out, was one of the kindest men that ever lived .... He likewise revealed a keen interest in any stranger he met, casting upon him an appraising eye, taking prompt stock of the furnishings of his mind, annexing him if he proved worthwhile with frank eagerness I never met in anyone else. Cournos in 1913 when EP was 28 maintaining a party of intelligence every Monday evening in a restaurant in Frith Street I do think the artist loses something both from his life and his art which it takes the whole skill of a lifetime to restore .... It is perhaps only that at the start certain things come of themselves, without will, or half consciously, and that after a certain date they require a definite act of volition. Letter to Quinn about 1915 - he was 30. alive with the action of light in the world In those days I wasn't ashamed of reading, it was the necessary work. Now most reading feels like shameful waste, partly because I am not reading with the same energy and partly as if there is something else I should be doing. 7 It seems as though life is past, Mary said. 8 Easter made me think of - many years has made me think of - the year Rudy was born, when Judy, Paul and I stayed with the Friesens in their big house by the creek. M was in Sexsmith at Johanna's for a week I suppose. It was the first week of April so the creek was almost to the bottom of the bridge roaring day and night. We slept in an east-facing room upstairs - east-facing meant it looked over a hedged lawn to the creek. What I remember most is eating a chocolate egg in that slope-ceilinged wall-papered room, reading Christian romances I'd found in a box under the eaves. Easter Sunday afternoon, I think. I was ten. Across the hall in Corny's room there was a big coloured picture of a long-legged young woman in short shorts, a gingham shirt tied under her bust, and a frayed straw hat, who had a beautiful shape with big pointed breasts - it was the first time I'd seen a pin-up. I knew his parents would not have wanted it to be there. It was during that visit, maybe it's why I remember the moment I do, that I realized I would eventually have breasts. I realized it because I'd noticed that Madeleine Friesen, who was three? years older than me, now had a round swelling under her sweater. Most of this memory is visual and there isn't a lot of it. I can see Madeleine's bosom but not her face, the bed's position in the room, the dingy yellow paper cover of the Christian romances, shadowy light in the room, the chocolate shell in my hand, where a bite was showing a yellow yolk - don't think I'd seen a candy yolk in an Easter egg before. Otherwise in relation to Easter I remember dyeing eggs - the particular deep purple - and Mary baking paska in washed tin cans so they would be tall. It's not an interesting memory as I've told it but it has a wider silent penumbra - child registering what it's like to be in an upstairs room, the snow-melt week outside, the whole countryside around this house, the open miles of roads, hills, the church, our place that way, northeast, with our father in it. The next time Mary was in the hospital, having a miscarriage, we all stayed home and I kept house. Something I feel dimly when I remember that house and ours too, is that I was living in the time of Mary's youth. We were children in our parents' time - the photos from before she was married, the buttons in her button jar, that had come from clothes she wore then, the cars and trucks, the rat tail she'd used to roll her hair still in a drawer, the teatowels embroidered with the days of the week and cats doing the washing, baking bread. Annals of a former world. The people they knew, names they spoke of people and places we didn't know. It was an early world, the '40s. Young people standing in the box of a graintruck laughing on an outing. I can't find that one in her albums now. My interest was completely silent, I studied the photos but didn't ask her anything. We didn't know there was that sort of conversation. Something else I wanted to write down was headlights at night. I will see a pair of headlights rising on the road below the house, here, and it will make me think of the depth of silent feeling there was then, when we'd look out the kitchen window and see headlights sinking down the long hill. We'd run to the living room window to see whether they'd turn into our lane. Often it would be our dad coming home from town in the grain truck. We'd hear the growl. We kids could hear a motor a mile and a half away, turning off the Wembley highway onto our road. Our mom, Judy and Paul and I would be standing in the lamplight in the kitchen, listening. Mary would say she couldn't hear it. Then it would come closer and she could hear it too. We were always excited when Ed came home. Would he bring something. He'd come in and stamp on the flattened cardboard at the door, set a box on the table. Sometimes he'd bring O Henrys. They were 5 cents each, like ice cream cones. He never came in cheerful and friendly, there was always a curt bitter sound in his voice. We would stand silent looking at him. Lamplight on the arborite table, which was a grey marble pattern. Blue walls, yellow tile-patterned linoleum halfway up the walls, grey linoleum on the floor. The awkward kitchen counter a real carpenter had built, just the bottom half of a set of cabinets. Slop pail under the sink. Water bucket on the right edge of the counter with a dipper in it that must have been how I got a cold sore from Bobby Miller. Small mirror over the washbasin. Three cupboard doors, one to the right of the sink, two to the left, and a tier of drawers (from top to bottom cutlery, teatowels, packaged food like jello, cocoanut, and raisins). We had no sort of fridge, not even a cooler, so leftovers, milk and butter would be in the cupboard somewhere. Lidded big bread pan in the left corner of the counter, that was used to rise dough but also to store loaves. Big calendar picture on the wall above the counter, a country scene with eastern trees and a lane. - Lamplight on the table after supper. If we had a report to write we'd have the encyclopedia out. We'd be easy and natural if it was just us without our dad. Shadows in the corner of the room. Likely the other lamp in the living room. Such a small natural house, the way the kitchen and living room opened onto each other through a door set diagonally across the point where all four rooms would have met. Wood box next to it with a metal match holder hung above it. We'd come into the dark cold house and Mary would walk over to the match holder in the dark. We'd hear her strike a match. She'd light a lamp and then make the fire. Smell of used oil poured onto wood. There was a can of it kept under the stove. Parent and child zones as far apart as they could be in so small a house. In their bedroom blue walls with a gold satin bedspread, a south window with curtain blowing - light plastic curtains - and a curtained clothes closet built into the corner. Dresser with a mirror. - Lyall Watson 1999 Jacobson's organ and the remarkable nature of smell WW Norton Hagfish see nothing, but clearly smell very well, swimming up a gradient of fishy flavours, traveling with undulating movements, turning always in the direction of the strongest stimulus, choosing the right odour corridors, keeping on going until they get there. Hagfish and lamprey put themselves into an odour corridor by swinging their bodies from side to side, sampling water on a broad front with their single nasal opening. Experiments with salmon show that they are able to distinguish between plain water and water in which an aquatic plant has been briefly rinsed. In one experiment with a white-tip shark, an injured fish was allowed to swim the length of a tank before taking cover. When the shark was released soon afterwards it followed exactly the same zigzag line, duplicating every movement made by the now-invisible prey. In small, bottom-living sharks such as the spotted dogfish, the focus appears to be a weak electrical field produced by another fish's muscles. And all these impressions seem to be enhanced by smell, even linked with it in some strange way. In some places [air] has become so primed with the by-products of life that it comes close to being a living tissue in its own right. Even the cleanest air, at the centre of the South Pacific or somewhere near Antarctica, has two hundred thousand assorted bits and pieces in every lungful. And this count rises to two million or more in the thick of the Serengeti migration, or over a six-lane highway during rush hour in downtown Los Angeles. Every lungful of air we borrow from this gruel is likely to contain a few stray viruses in transit between their hosts; four or five common bacteria; fifty or sixty fungi, including several rusts or moulds; one or two minute algae drifting in from the coast; and possibly a fern or moss spore, or even an encysted protozoan. smell cells naked neurons, each one right out there in the open, like a unicellular organism, meeting molecules, making its own way in the world. And, strangest of all, smell cells wear out after a few weeks and need to be replaced on the front lines. They regenerate in ways no other nerve cells in our bodies ever do. Humans have about six million cells; rabbits fifty million; and sheep dogs over two hundred million. Jacobson's Organ a rival chemical sense system hibernaculum garter snakes' immediate response is to put their heads down close to the ground, flick their tongues out to actually touch the trace, and to go on doing so more and more rapidly as the stimulus grows in strength. Jacobson's Organ begins to look like an unconscious partner to the nose ... deals with the hypothalamus rather than the more modern thalamus ... in touch with the reptilian brain rather than the mammalian brain. Birds that reuse old nest sites have trouble with parasites that make life miserable for new chicks but some of them line their nests each season with fresh vegetation taken from plants that are known to have antibiotic and pesticidal properties. European starlings in Ohio, for instance, show a prefernce for small-flowered agrimony, elm-leafed goldenrod and yarrow - despite the fact that these are all New World species and starlings were imported and released into the US only in 1890. They are all plants that produce volatile substances which could be useful in fumigating a nest, and should be detectable to the nose of a bird. On the way out, urine picks up an amazing range of perfumes provided by the renal tubes, the adrenal glands, the bladder, and the secretions of male accessory sex organs ... . So by the time urine finds its way into the world, it is a very personal product faeces augmented by secretions from rectal and anal ... pouches, sacs and glands, all of which flavour faeces Under certain circumstances, the salivary glands of pigs become so laden with sexual promise that one whiff of a boar's breath is enough to persuade a sow in oestrus to fall immediately into the posture that indicates her readiness to mate. In pronghorn antelopes there is a glandular area between the hooves which leaves traces of scent other antelopes can follow, even in the dark, and over stony ground. some mammals even begin to exercise their sense of smell in the womb. Pregnant rats injected intravenously with a volatile substance that can be traced ... traces in the embryo's brain are found, not in the main olfactory bulb, but in the accessory bulb fed by Jacobson's Organ, which seems already to be part of a system that allows unborn young to get to know the scent of their mother from her amniotic fluid. 9 Turkey hunting season fall November, spring end of March - beg. May. Santa Ysabel Space Preserve West this morning - two-wheel track through a meadow, subtlest spice in the air. 11
The ship of death 14 Snow light. 9 on a Saturday morning. Rain blasted down yesterday. Then in the dark I could see a sift of white on the ground. This morning it's there between blades of grass under low cloud moving steadily east. I suppose the tall pale purple lupins are standing with their feet in snow. I've had to nurse the fire to start it, half an hour crouched on the floor watching the state of the flame, turning the fan off and on. Have been avoiding talking about Tom's visit. After I took him to the bus yesterday early I came back and slept, then sat in the bath reading the New Yorker, then ate custard and read newspapers Tom had brought, then slept some more, then sat with Favor's web pages, then slept till well into daylight. Not thinking about Tom because it's useless, it makes no difference to this so-unending stuckness. I started to be shut down when he opened his pack and brought out presents I didn't want. A plastic travel cup, a City Beat, a dirty old bird book. It makes me choose between rudeness and silent anger. If I don't say "Why do you bring me this kind of trash?" I'm defeated from the beginning. And then he sat fiddling with the computer wanting me to listen to his radio station, which I resent because I'm already in resentment for many reasons, although he feels it as a loving gift. And then he wanted to talk. He had a spiel defending himself, he hammers on and I go autistic. I did rise up and yell about money, how he controls connection with me by means of money. He denies everything. I'm locked in myself saying I'm going to escape, I'm going to find somewhere I can be trustful and seen. I'm not looking at him. There's one instant of another kind. We're sitting on the couch and he puts his arm around me. I see his forearm, the copper hair on it, against my ribs and I have a flash of such longing. Is it longing, yearning. Amazes me coming in the midst of autistic hate like a geological inclusion. We're lying in bed. He's talking. Then he stops. I start. I'm speaking quietly from my pillow, leaking tears. I say I don't love him any more. I stopped after what happened with meth. He was so horrible then. That was when I stopped sleeping with him, and nothing can happen without that. I think I started by saying I'm more desperate now than I ever have been, because of pain and not seeing any way it can get better, and unending loneliness. I said I'm thinking of killing myself. He didn't blink at that. I said How can you hear something like that and not blink. He said, You just wanted to hear yourself say it, and some other things. It was true, it was sensible, and quite a lot of what he was saying was sensible, but I was just longing to have him shut up and get into his own bed. Which he did, but woke at 3:30 and got up to pee and dropped the lamp and then got into bed with me so I was wrecked on account of not sleeping enough. Out of that is there anything to conclude. He phoned after his seniors' center meeting to check whether I was warm. That was nice. I said I was sorry for him that he had come such a long way and had such a bad time.
What I'm feeling is that it's a cusp. I can move to Palm Springs to edge away, sneak away geographically. Or we can take it on. He's more lucid, he isn't locked away with bad men, he's writing. The seniors' center work is good for him. He's clearer. He's reading. He's more my equal. We'd have to deal with all the years of resentment.
Another moment when I was dressing to go fetch him, pausing by the underwear shelf, will I wear the lace bra, no. I caught myself in that bitter refusal of hope and did wear the white lace. 15 "There's a creepy youth minister kind of squareness to him, especially combined with that goofy eagerness to please," Downey said. Of Romney. - Worked on Orion all day - it's 11:10 and I've just stopped. Stamina of focus. 16 Frank's birthday. I've gone through the MG journal so far and sorted onto six pages. Bits for Here, Tom story, melancholy, to do, dreams, and best work. Seen mixed in, the melancholy sems alright, necessary, a good sign. As if to be real I will always have to be aching in aloneness, and I can be willing if I know what it is. The near meadow is long grass, dotted with mustard now, sleek and sheeny in the sun. The Engelmanns are spring deciduous! So that they look as if they're dying. 17 April [Written at the uphill cabin.] It's more silent here. There's more bird sound. I can see further. There's a table on a deck raised above the grass. Someone's been here, the two panes that fell when I opened the window are gone, someone tried replacing them with aluminum foil that's been torn open by weather. The posts on either side of the window are full of acorn holes. It's chilling as the sun has set directly behind me with a white pillar marking the place. I can hear cattle lowing in more than one direction. There was a gobble. Again. From here it's as if life is far below. These oaks aren't broad in the trunk but very rangy, long thin arms widespread. There is the one blazing window on the mountain's flank. The air amidst the hills is milky. Many of the Engelmanns ghostly reddish pale. I saw a bobcat from the kitchen window. It was like a large tabby but had a wildcat's sort of pointed beard. What do I feel about the house. Its dilapidation at the same time as its good design. It couldn't be mended, it would have to be rebuilt. It hasn't rotted, it has evaporated, its boards are like bones that have had their calcium leached. It's unsound, the deck has fallen next to the front door. It's built in the style of my house, the chimney is the same fieldstone heap. It has so many signs of summer pleasure, a ring of stones on the table in front of me, a birdhouse hung from the eaves, a collection of weathered bits of wood strung on a wire, irises planted at the base of rocks, an empty bird feeder, Adirondack chairs in the grass and on another deck beside the kitchen. Narcissus on the east slope into the ravine above my house. A small painting of an apple nailed next to the kitchen door. The grass is very fine, as if it's native prairie. There's an oak sapling, live oak not Engelmann, sprung up between the second and third steps onto this deck. The birds have silenced as it's darkening, but cattle are still bawling. Crickets. There's a fresh damp smell, it's more forested and the smell is making me think of Wales, is it, a greener place. April 18 I made a bedroom yesterday, the white middle room. Thinking ahead to a week from today, Tim and Katy, and Jerry sometime and I suppose maybe Louie in summer. Thought I should start sleeping in the bed I'll use when Tim and K are using this one, to get used to it. It has morning sun, warm by 9. I like the white, the three very tall multiple stalks of iris. Didn't sleep well. Dreamed a lot of junk. But yesterday I loved it here, again. The phone rang toward 7 and I let it ring. 8 times. Then went out to the jeep and drove up to the wrecked cabin, sat on the high deck at the table. Came back and cleaned the bedroom. Noticed I've begun to think of staying. - What do I like so much up here. It's a lot wilder. There's long grass. It's now, at noon, with the sun overhead, full of the buzz of those large black beetles. It has a vast view but it's hidden. It's been inhabited more freely than the ranchhouse. It's dying at its own pace, full of lived life. This comfortable chair has wild oats swaying before it and a low table next to it, a branch sloping next to it almost to the ground. A velvet breeze. Bird cheeps. A single-engine plane fading to the east. Jays. A lot of tangle, heaps of boulders, trees young, mature and dead. Snakes, surely. It reminds me of the lake house. Inside I don't like to touch things. Dark and dirty. Oak leaves are rattling down. Toward the west the whole hillside is faintly orange. The breeze is more benevolent here. I've nervous because the house belongs to someone, and I'm wary of the man who lives over there in the old camper, though I haven't seen him close enough to have reason, and there's a flock of jays yelling almost continuously, chasing each other, but it's a platform that is giving me something. Breeze picks up in the canopy. Leaves rattle down. One on my arm. It's clouding over. Some of the oaks are a great mess. 19 Posted Misery and Cabin yesterday, with photos from up the hill. Said I don't like to confess misery but if I don't I misrepresent the enterprise. Meant by that, I'd been remembering that misery is a cost of the life I want. So bear it frankly and humorously. I'm writing in the new bedroom. Window rectangles on the floor, remarkable iris antlers across the room. The good French doors. Had a sense in assembling the writing yesterday that I'd just barely touched into knowing what I was doing. Do I remember what I mean. Not at the moment. Also understanding that whatever I do next will have to take a while to form, it can't step off from what I already know. Jody:
E:
20 Woke with pale color just beginning over the mountains. The room isn't cold. Went to Here: a notebook. Could read it, believe it, not rise to it but remember it. It leaves everything behind. I don't completely know what to do with it but I know some. - Then drove Black Canyon Road to Ramona to buy a lot of food for guests. Now I'm in the iron chair for the first time in months. The mountains are standing in milk. It's cool in the last light. There are the coyotes beginning. Two packs I think, one below in Norman's draw, one farther west. Gobbling behind the closest hill in the east. Pale orange behind the Coulter pines. Oak tips above me are completely bare but have knobs, what are they. Flower buds, tight little knots. First star. Almost too dark to see the line. First bat I think. First cricket. Two bats. That light is probably a liner starting to descent to Lindberg Field. My trajectory. - I've found John Rowley working for the Gandhi Foundations - found him by trying Google Images, there was his bright face. - Black Mountain this morning. It's impressive. It's bare and triangular and isn't black but has an aura of darkness: its soil is red but there's a uniform grey scrub that gives off as if a thin mist of blackness. 21 Saturday. Jerry will phone soon to say he's on his way. Doors and windows open. Guest room ready. I came in to fetch something and on the brilliant grass outside the open windows saw five turkeys, a puffed-up cock and four hens. The cock seemed absorbed in egotistic fantasy. He would step this way a few steps, that way a few steps, dragging his fanned wingtips so they rattled against the ground. The four hens were grazing steadily with their backs to him. I cleaned. The house is ready enough and am I. There are probably things I should do to prepare to enjoy people, these particular people, to remind myself who they are.
A bird got into the house last night, little thing with a long beak. [wren] Dashed from one end of the kitchen to the other never finding the two open doors. I left birdseen on the sill of an open window and went to bed but in the morning it was still there dashing itself at the closed kitchen window. [technical notes] 25 Things have gone wrong all at once.
Have set poison and mousetraps, freaked by so many small black seeds. 28 April
Let me get rid of her before I talk about anything else. I didn't like 1. her body 2. her voice 3. her lack of presence. 1. She's mingey, breastless but has a forward sway at the belly, looks weak and starved, narrow-nosed, waspish often except when she is lit up in some tale from her past. 2. Her voice is flat and nasal. 3. Even up at the cabin yesterday with evening light and the place's full blast of magic she was standing with her back to the view telling me some story about their neighbour in Portsmouth. None of her stories are well told. She's incurious and unsensory, unplayful. Then there is the birding, which is folie à deux, I mean the way it is on alert every moment - the central interchange in the marriage it seems, along with their cats. Yesterday morning I hadn't slept enough and couldn't bear the thought of hours of her and lit out to Ramona down Black Canyon Road. Last night went to bed early with the door shut. When I undressed I hung my white lace bra on a peg in the corridor - deliberated it - as a flag marking my female dominance in the house, and this morning had an hour at the window playing with Tim while she made sandwiches and packed. A bird lit on an oak brach directly in front of us. A kingbird he said, slender, presenting a pale yellow belly. What else I liked, on the road back from Ramona stopping where I could look at Black Mountain. The air was light and full of sage. A half dozen vultures with their fingered wingtips spread, high, very high, low, shadows slipping across the road. The mountain's colors, red under many mauve patches and fewer quite vivid khaki patches, with dark shrubs in the creases, a pyramidal heap with its foot in a stream I could hear far below, and a red road cut crossing at an angle. Otherwise the whole quiet of the road on a bright early morning. Last night coming onto the casino's vast parking lot after dinner, bright few stars and newish moon high, pervasive smell of Cleveland sage. As we drove down the hill through scarves of mist a large white owl flapped low across the road ahead of us. Another just as we arrived at my corner. We closed the gate and stood all three in the dark smelling the air, Tim trying his barn owl call. Then drove up the hill with the car's white headlights pushing up through more scarves of mist and arrived at a homey house with back-lit orange curtains. Jerry is already a long time back but is there anything to tell. - In a minute. Start with this room. Sun in the east window solves the problem of morning cold. Long iris stalks from the cabin in the tall glass rectangle on the desk, buds on antlers, one open, seven to come. Cedar quietly wriggling all over. Jerry. I liked how he looked. Older man with a beard. Man of few words and many interests I said to Greg. We looked up the wildflowers. We told more travel stories. He never once used a swearword. I talked and talked and he seemed pleased to have me doing it. I showed him the monograph. We watched the Pergolesi. I showed him the first photos I took with the Nikon. He didn't say anything about the PCR photos. He had a good time I think. He did sometimes choose a good word. I made us baked apples. He didn't eat the core and the skin, which is to say most of it. I said You didn't like the baked apple. He said, I did but I didn't eat it as thoroughly as you. There are California boy things that are like Tom - he has the TV on all the time at home (though nature documentaries), is always going to the fridge for juice, drank most of a bottle of wine by himself, is in debt, has been married and divorced three times. But has his senses and his feelings still, and is easy good company, generous, grateful, honest. Did I behave well with my company. I think so. I made sure of their comfort. I provided maps and guidebooks and insider's suggestions. Jerry liked his room. And now. Packets day after tomorrow. Flight on Thursday 17th, which is 18 days only. 29 Susan eats apple cores. Louie eats apple cores. Not doing it shows a damning conventionality. "It is the business of the painter not to be content with nature," the surprising Constable explained, "but to make something of nothing, in attempting which he must almost of necessity become poetical." In McFee Silk parachute. A jag of McFee reading, some of Annals and the Coming into the country and then bits of Silk parachute. Watching how he does it. He's a smart entertainer, knows how to jump around between stories, how to pick out the quirky instant in an interview, lard with technical vocabulary and know-how, sketch paragraph biographies. He's alert to his own humor. He devises folksy twists of tongue. "I could start in the shrewdest possible place in a structure to be shaped like a nautilus by chronological flashback." I also ask myself about his constraints: he's a small man, not pretty, but he's east coast prep-school and Princeton and Cambridge. Doctor's son. He has worked hard - boils down from a thousand pages to 200, Tim said - and it has won him access to anyone, very nearly, and anywhere. "On each day of our conversation, he went for a seven-mile bike ride along the towpath" - at 79. "I always read the second draft aloud." "The thing you're going to spend as much as three years with." You write a lead. You sit down and think, where do I want the piece to begin? What makes sense? It can't be meretricious. It's got to deliver on what you promise. It should shine like a flashlight down through the piece. So you write a beginning. You go back to your notes and start looking for an overall structure. It's three times as easy if you've got that lead. In the white space between those two sections there's a hell of a lot of stuff that I don't have to say. It's told by the structure. If you've got good juxtapositions, you don't have to worry about what I regard as idiotic things, like composed transitions. If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you. Outline - "What it does is free you to write. The spontaneity comes in the writing." Stories are always really, really hard. There are some people whose cast of mind admits that sort of stuff, and there are others, who are just paralyzed by it at the outset [geology]. Where getting older and having experience kicks in is after you have a first draft. The routine produces. But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being into becoming some kind of slave. I simply don't want to break through that membrane. I'd do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don't want to go there because there's so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going. That's my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I'm going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day ... . 30 What's wrong with Chopra - he wants there to be a 'mind' that runs the body. "The brain is just another machine. The driver needs to be there." 1989. Unusual remission is the observation. "Intelligence is present in our bodies ... more important than the actual matter of our bodies." Skin is new every month, new stomach lining every 4 days, surface cells every 5 min. Not brain though. He's holding a distinction between structure, "the physical make-up", and function, "their know-how". "Molecular structure secondary to the brain's ability to use it." "These attributes of her mind have found a chemical pathway that the brain can follow to talk to the body." "Mind by any definition is immaterial." Monocytes - cells in the immune system - receptors for neurotransmitters. "Receptors constantly dance off the surface of cell walls and change their shape to receive new ..." "Mind and body are like parallel universes." Neuropeptides and receptors also in other organs. Pert "mind/body", "network of information", bodymind. Insulin produced by brain. "This makes drugs look much more dangerous than we thought." Valium affects immune system. It is as if he's back and forth over a line between monism and dualism in his manner of speech. Depression and imipramine - receptors on skin cells. Gives an example of associative addiction. What he means by information must be something like pattern. He contrasts "solid matter" but there is no such thing. "Atoms." He wants to call disease-cause memory because associative. "To feel happy and to fight cancer are much the same thing at the molecular level." Being unhappy at our age is a danger to health. "We mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the rider and the horse are the same. Intelligence is free to go where it likes, even where molecules cannot." One mode of consciousness to spontaneously correct the mistakes in another. - These deciduous trees are black locust? Robinia pseudoacacia. Wood is brittle, thorny branches, deep brown furrowed bark, white fragrant flowers. Honey and fence posts, escaped in California's gold country. - Lupins grape-soda silver-green leaves (Arizona is desert) above 2000' fragrant perennial. - In a vase what I think are grape soda lupins, mauve and white, the white showing in unopened buds at their drooping tips, and a branch of what I've discovered is black locust, with drooping racemes of white flowers. The locust flowers smell strongly of grape soda and the lupins so faintly I'm not sure the scent hasn't drifted over from the locust. Both have pea flowers, but the lupins have silver stems and flat five-fingered leaves, and the locust the usual robinia feather leaf. Why wd they have the same scent? Today was Tom's birthday. I phoned in the early aft because I knew he is like that, not because we had anything to say. I also got gmail back somehow with the help of Henry in south Florida (where it was raining) after Satman told me the only way was to threaten to quit Hughesnet without the penalty, and a young woman I'd been emphatic with had told me the secret of getting past the machine to a person (say no when it asks if you are having technical difficulties). I'm in the new bedroom at 9:30 at night. It's more cut off at night. When I went into the dark living room to get the clock I could see a faint glow of what I realized must be moonlight on the floor, mist almost to the window but clear, nearly clear, to the half moon above. - I didn't know sea mist came this far inland, and it didn't until evening though Tom said it was there on the coast. I like this room so much in the morning though. White well of light, horizontal smudges of rainbow on the far wall, one on either side of the door like eyebrows. - Too much influenced by fine writing at the moment, McFee and The best American essays of the century. Stately cadence coming up with mannered phrases - mannered? But what does that mean. Something fake though pleasurable: self-admiring. McFee isn't, I think, so there's more to find. Luke says Sara's in the hospital, "positive biopsy", lungs filled with fluid, hard to breathe, "they can't operate", dying I'm supposing. He says he feels callous, which means he's angry. I can believe she was unjust to him but it's not good for him to be angry as she dies.
2 Say there are no atoms. Steven Greenblatt 2011 The swerve: how the world became modern Norton Returned to circulation after a millennium. capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure constraints of curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the world and the body world made more beautiful by its transience intellectual daring Titus Lucretius Carus 99-55 BC Roman poet philosopher, Epicurean, infl Virgil. Epicurus 342 BCE And if the natural order is unimaginably vast and complex, it is nonetheless possible to understand something of its basic constitutive elements and its universal laws. Indeed, such understand is one of human life's deepest pleasures. dying from an excruciating obstruction of the bladder but achieving serenity of spirit by recalling all of the pleasures he had experienced in his life. They neglect the most necessary appetites as if they were the most alien to nature. It is impossible to live pleasurably, Philodemus continued, without living prudently and honourably and magnanimously, and without making friends and without being philanthropic. [In Alexandria] at a lavish site known as the Museum, most of the intellectual heritage of Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian and Jewish cultures had been assembled at enormous cost as early as 300 BCE luring leading scholars, scientists, and poets to their city by offering them life appointments with handsome salaries, tax exemptions, free food and lodging, and the almost limitless resources of the library. Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria, Archimedes discovered pi and laid the foundations for calculus; Eratosthenes posited that the earth was round and calculated its circumference to within 1 percent; Galen revolutionized medicine. Alexandrian astronomers postulated a heliocentric universe; geometers deduced that the length of a year was 365 and a quarter days and proposed adding a leap day every fourth year; geographers speculated that it would be possible to reach India by sailing west from Spain; engineers developed hydraulics and pneumatics; anatomists first understood clearly that the brain and the nervous system were a unit, studied the function of the heart and the digestive system and conducted experiments in nutrition. ... in a global cosmopolitanism pursuit of textual accuracy ... shelved according to alphabetical order. Hypatia ... one of the Museum's famous scholars-in-residence ... astronomy, music, mathematics, and philosophy ... Plato and Aristotle ... wrapped in the traditional philosopher's cloak ... stripped of her clothing, her skin was flayed off with broken bits of pottery. Found Christian doctrine absurd - soul is mortal. Christians must understand that pleasure is a code name for vice ... brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, the sinfulness of mankind and the anger of a just Father ... humans were by nature corrupt ... deserved every miserable catastrophe. Widespread self-flagellation in the late Middle Ages Poggio's style of script The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is the epitome of a failed life. The quintessential emblem of religion - and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core - is the sacrifice of a child by its parent. ... endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son. While we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic. Late-life melancholy Reading Greenblatt on Renaissance Humanism marveling at the Christian millennia that refused intelligence, contained it. The point of More's [utopia] is to imagine those conditions that would make it possible for an entire society to make the pursuit of happiness its collective goal. Of Bruno: What he prized was the courage to stand up for the truth against the belligerant idiots who were always prepared to shout down what they could not understand. rising of the sun of the ancient and true philosophy, for so many centuries entombed in the dark caverns of blind, spiteful, arrogant, and envious ignorance. Each of the fixed stars observed in the sky is a sun. Thomas Harriot who didn't publish what he knew. Shakespeare, Montaigne's Essays quote Lucretius. Montaigne "Your death is part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world." Lucretius: "And men, like runners, pass along the torch of life." resurgence of ancient materialism Newton's atomism "solid, massy, hard, impenetrable moveable Particles" formed by G. Jefferson "pursuit of happiness." - Our bodies are in the process of choosing our death without telling us how it will happen. Is Meigs. Looking at my FB page - the music - the Stabat Mater - now remembering watching it with Jerry. 3 David Rimmer broke his back in three places falling downstairs drunk, says Sylvia. - Smelling dead mice in the kitchen, near the stove and at the narrower door. Are they in the walls? It's a smell like rotting dishwater on hot days. - Photos for Here - chair in the mustard field, grass and flowers, the leaf fall steps, between Winter sill and Misery. I've taken two days delinquent from packets to read about Lucretius and the Renaissance, and then today the pleasure of adding something to my site, making something. The chair deep in mustard, looking out of the frame, flowering space behind it, fleurissant. - Reading Beyond recall, Lise's edit of Meigs' last years 84-86, I felt I shouldn't record bodily failings in old age. I should fight to be something else. I also felt I shouldn't let it get to bedpans and assistants and doctor appointments. But was it that she'd been cushioned by money and hadn't much edge to start with? Cat and garden and writer and lesbian friends and dead people, a few. May 5
A young woman [my student], 24, very articulate, holed up in fantasy and medievalism, a scholastic by training? Something like that, arcane, refusing the best of later knowledge, ill, asexual she says. Wants to write a book showing how Christianity is compatible with magic, by which she means burning candles with herbs attached to them and getting into baths with herbs strewn. I'm saying that with scorn because she seems neither a Christian nor a magician, just a girl who has been praised by her father for aptitude in theology and is afraid to tell her Baptist parents she thinks she's gay. It seems a deep mess she hasn't the moxie to fight her way out of, so she'll stay locked out of her senses and ill.
I'm in some ways an ideal advisor for her because I understand ritual and have thought about even the archetype of the medieval. I work with the tarot, I talk to a larger self, and yet my whole impulse with her is to explode her insanity, which she will have to feel as attack. A therapist would gently expand feeling, over years, and after being invited. I say what I know and let her deal with it however she can. Odd insects at the window, small wings and six amazingly long legs, body like a little brown dragonfly. [Crane fly says the net.] - Then Black Canyon Road to shop in Ramona, Willie Nelson going, Wrecking Ball coming back, perfect happiness. Something about the direction of the light, going I see more individual flowers, today Parry phacelia dark blue, a lot of monkeyflower whose off-yellow I don't like, a lot of mustard, a sort of quilted white strawflower [bicolor everlasting], a lot of best yellow something that's new [golden yarrow], white forget-me-not clumps, purple and pale blue lupins, just a few of that claret-colored little thing [wild flax], something that looked like yellow dames rocket [coast wallflower], one blue penstemon was it [foothill penstemon], purple vetch of course [winter vetch, not native], one thick-blooming ceanothus that must must have been spared by the fire, thistles, white onion flowers quite small [red-skin onions probably], one Indian paintbrush next to something yellow, a pale blue smaller phacelia, small white bindweed, dudleya in bud, occasional dark pink wild pea, buckwheat lower down, moonflower at the far end with Ramona in view, a sunflower near it - was that all? Next time I'll take the book. [Lightner's Wildflowers of San Diego County] The road has stages. It's a ranch road broad and washboarded through pasture, and then ferny winding shade, and then is suddenly a narrow shelf scraped into the side of a canyon, supported below by a hand-made rock wall. At its north end the canyon is a narrow hard-rock slot dropping steeply in falls. Last week there was water. Then the first canyon stretch, which drops to the bridge passing the res village halfway. It has a relatively gentle herbaceous feel - green slopes. Most of the flowers I named are there. The bridge has a hundred feet of asphalt either side, a hinge. Beyond it there's a strong change. The road is narrower and rougher and the drop to the creek much steeper. It seems wilder and drier there. Black Mountain in its glorious skin of color rises visible from foot to little comb-crest of pines across the deeps of scented air that are the vulture's broad theatre. A lot of sharp blind corners. And then longer winds onto a messy plateau from which it's almost possible to see the ocean. After that ugly pretentious houses begin and the road becomes Magnolia Avenue, where 55 on asphalt feels fast. Perfect happiness why. Heat, light, motion, music, maybe a sense that now I can be on that road whenever I like, I can be of it. It isn't possible to photograph the mountain. It has so much presence when I'm standing opposite, eye-level somewhere about a third of the way up. It's right there. I can't photograph the gulf of air. I can't get much of it into the frame unless I show it small and far away. It can't loom. I'm always having to edge around foreground clumps or slopes. 6 Army Spc Ramon Ojeda, 22, military supply convoy attacked May 1 2004, Al Amarah Iraq. 18th Engineer Battalion, 25th Infantry. Joined when he was 17. Wife Leslie in the same unit, 14-month son Angel, now 9. First Ramona boy killed in Iraq. Highway 78 between 3rd St and 67 named Ramon Ojeda Memorial Highway. "That was something that really healed my heart, that Bin Laden was killed on my son's anniversary." I was working in the bedroom, late morning, and wondered whether I was hearing a knock. Was it a woodpecker? Not quite. It came again. No, a bit heavier and not as even. I jumped up and just caught a man turning away from the door. Mexican, cap and moustache, and he's with the younger of the girls who wanted a lift past the rattlesnake. There's also a little boy, three maybe. He's asking to use some of my water for his sprayer. He's spraying weeds that have been coming up through the asphalt. The little girl is the one I liked. Small, maybe 9, very pert and confident, speaks up. I have the top half of my dutch door open and she's right there. I like them both and come darting at them with questions. Joaquin Ojeda and his little grandson is Joaquin too. He's trim and erect in a plaid shirt and jeans. He says he's 65, I say I'm older than him. I feel remarkably lively and forward with the two of them. I ask if I can come visit them. His eyes brighten. The little girl will be going back to her mom in Oceanside he says, though it's better here. When? She'll be here half the summer she says. I say good, so I'll see her again. He puts out his hand to say goodbye. She's close next to his arm trying to see past me into the room. He is walking away but she's still there. I say she can come see me any time, just knock on the door and I'll show her the house, I can see she's curious. She puts up her thin small arms to hug me across the lower half of the door. Her thin little body in my arms. I go away and google Joaquin Ojeda and find many stories about the death in Iraq of his only son Ramon, at 22 on May 1 2004, eight years ago. I was reading them with a strong pressure of tears that surprised me. - It's just before eight and the mountains are almost whited out, a thick haze. Bats back and forth in front of the window. Full moon last night, perigee, they said, but so much fibre in the air it wasn't as bright as I've seen it in the desert. 7 For the first time in 164 years [2011-2026] Neptune will travel through your own sign ... new self worth ... natural talents are enhanced ... restrictions fade ... the right response ... immediately more power, influence and 'presence' in the world ... if you are a practicing counselor in any field you will find yourself in much demand. But the most beautiful aspect of this Neptune change is the beauty and pure magic of life, as it grows anew in your heart. - I've noticed a glassy chunk of rock next to the mudroom back door and today I find it is mahogany obsidian - it has a cut side that lets it stand on end, which makes me think someone who lived here bought it, but the way I came to ask about it was by reading that the Iipay traded to the Imperial Desert for obsidian. 8 Grey fox in the periwinkle. 9
- Dead mouse smell strong in the kitchen, getting stronger especially by the long cupboard. It's not in the wall because the wall is solid plank. Can't see how it could be in the cupboard, don't see any way for a mouse to get in. But this morning when I opened a drawer to look for a stamp the smell seemed very thick so I looked again. There were some coiled hard drive connector cables in a plastic bag,and inside the coils a wad of what looked like slipper fleece. I pick up the plastic bag and hurry it outside and dump it. Out tumble three dead baby mice jumping with maggots. She had found such a sweet ideal nesting place, contained and private. Had her babies and then one day didn't come home probably because she was the one whacked in the trap next to the sink. - There was the lovely way she or some other mouse would slip through the small hole carved in the corner of the sunroom door. It never seemed big enough but she'd flatten somehow bonelessly and slip through. Always a tiny moment of preparing herself, and then the flattening motion with back feet spread, and then zip. O little mouse. 10 Many small lizards. First mosquito bites yesterday, two. - Had a conference call at one and used the morning to clean out the bedroom closet. When I'd moved boxes saw a dead mouse on the second shelf. Got my rubber gloves. The reason it wasn't smelling anymore was that it had been hollowed out by ants. NEVER let even one mouse move in. The way it goes - I do know this from other times - is that I like to see that one sweet little mouse and keep checking whether there are droppings and don't see any, and that goes on and then suddenly they are everywhere. Any open box in the closet, my unzipped shoulder bags. Catch the first one with a spring trap so it won't die hidden, immediately. Don't forget the awfulness of lying in bed on edge for faint threads of rot in the air or the way my scalp crawls at the thought of accidentally touching mouse droppings. I still have to deal with the drawer that had the mice babies in it - I'll have to wash it with bleach and leave it in the sun. - Julian town hall basement full of tables spread with wilted wildflowers. - Barbara at Julian Pies in Santa Ysabel saying a turkey hunter had been interested in the book I gave her and she'd thought Do I want a turkey hunter to know this much about turkeys? And not lent it to him. She is giving me decaff lattés for 75¢ and today said, I'll just put this in a bigger cup, it'll be easier, and then poured in twice as much. Laughed. - Talking to Luke last night - his early morning, he awake as dawn was coming up on his walls - said I'd send him photos of Peter Epp. Here's the one when he was 17 in Russia, look at him, steady, a calm, sensitive boy with a nice mouth. Something about his mouth, as if when I look at it I feel it in my own. 11 Dream I'm in bed with an older man - I'm college age - we are just talking - he's telling me about his two children - there's a son who's 26 who is working on Hafiz, I see the pages - he's a child psychologist and I'm liking him more as I'm feeling he's a good daddy - he has a hard-on he says, presses it against me - his belly is soft and whatever is below it doesn't feel like much to me - it's morning - as he leaves over the crest of the barn I ask something about how he and his wife divide the case work. He is saying over his shoulder that they each have guardianships they have to report on.
- With his moustache later he didn't have this soft steady look. He was sharper, friendly in a direct impersonal way. He seemed a joyful person, unconcerned, living just as he liked on a couple of acres with everything neat and pretty, orchard of trees with white-washed trunks, cucumber bed, raspberry rows. Above the door into the living room certificates from courses, small drawings, of what I don't remember. His wife I think was not much felt and was lonely, anxious, having no fun at all. Behind their house Yarrow Mountain and at its foot sometimes a train passing. Little house I can still see, kitchen door with red-painted stoop, next to it a columnar cedar. Tiny bedroom off the kitchen, my room, with Uncle Walter's university books in a cardboard box under the bed, wall-papered. Kitchen quite dark, side window onto the orchard, next to the fridge - was there a fridge? Door into the woodshed. Living room with windows to the orchard and the road. Door into their bedroom, which I don't think I ever entered. Small porch smelling of dried apples and hazelnuts. Path to the outhouse through the woodshed, past the cucumbers. [sketch] - "A bloated usury, a cowardly and sniveling politics, a disgusting financial system, the sadistic curse of Christianity" all worked together to degrade humanity and destroy nature. Religion which has taught the supreme lie that the splendour of the world is not a true splendour. superstition that the human body is tainted and that the senses are not noble avenues of illumination Art for life's sake had always been Pound's cry. - As I was turning onto 79 by the pie shop a woman putting out her thumb, fast glance, an Indian and a drinker. I stop. She's going to the Mesa Grande res. She's very sunburnt, sloppy breasts in a white bra under the bib of a dungaree shorts. Red lipstick. Quite fine-featured though wrecked. She says her name is Lorei, she's been in the village a year, two years, came from Golden Hill. "It's okay. Free rent." 12 Back to the Julian wildflower show yesterday. Four older women seemed to be running it. Even the woman considered the wildflower expert horrible, a fat toad hunkered behind her long table eating chicken, visibly Republican. - What is it today, rongée, which I feel means something like having my teeth on edge, ronger les ongles, hungry for something personal is what it feels like. Heart-hungry. Tia is on me about refusing Tom. "I have complete faith in my ability to determine who is worth it I'm only concerned that you are making yourself safe." I said it's luck to have that faith. It means you haven't been seduced. If I were a drinker today I'd drink. I couldn't sleep and then I got the glass thing and gave myself sweet-something and then dozed and have been useless since.
With Luke on FB chat:
This conversation was happening in a kind of dazzle of pleasure that he and I had lived mortal hours together there and loved them and still have them and can be together in them. That I made it the place he loved, its colors, its sightlines, the table on the porch. It happened to be Mother's Day. Tom sent a dumb guilty email excusing himself for not phoning. The way Luke himself is a place I hold in memory that way. That someone holds him in memory from little, that I can give him that, am giving him that. - Then I was reading the index page of AG1, Rowen's birth, and FB pinged, Rowen having moved to Vancouver and staying with Mike and Amy, who is due tomorrow, a week before Rowen's 27th birthday. 14 Last evening I was at Camp Stevens for the Second Sunday supper, which I found had been cancelled. Was walking back to the jeep annoyed. Three or four people were strolling toward the group of buildings behind me. I wasn't looking at them. Voice said Hi. Looked up to see a tall very beautiful young man gazing over his companions' heads at me. Opposite things happened in that moment. One was that I took him in, I scanned him with the visual authority that's native to me. I saw that he had greeted me because he was in charge of the place, and that he was an exceptionally fine human, in a well-born and maybe a religious way, someone who loves god. The other was that I felt myself a limping, ugly, older woman of no interest. In that sort of moment it doesn't occur to me that I might be seen as what I am. The grass is already browning everywhere. "The screening last Friday night drew quite a crowd. Several people remarked on how 'contemporary' Notes in origin is - I agree." [Helga] 15 One of Joe's helpers saw a rattler in the periwinkle just now. Last night two coyotes right close at the fenceline, one with a lower voice barking hard, the other howling. A butterfly on the pyracantha flowers, black white and orange. Might be the one I shooed out of the treehouse room, perfect as if brand new. Red admiral, I think. [California sister, probably.] Someone on my bench eating his sandwich! Someone else who looks like the moustached Doonesbury guy with the cowboy hat in the iron chair with a red setter next to him. - Iron chair again, hayfield around me. Scent of. Quite a cold wind. Lot of new leaves on the oak - little ones on whole small tip-twigs - so the tree is full and green again. It seems the air is never clear in spring and summer, milky into the distance. The slopes are brown and green in awkward patches. Fine sift of breeze in the pines. Late afternoon, sun in white sky in the west, above the cedars still but throwing shadows almost across what's now the lawn. Oak lace fluttering on the page. There's a stand of mustard still along the far edge. I'm wanting not to go. Rim of wild oat froth where I told them to leave the compost corner. Bluebird standing quiet in the hay, hello. Jumped for a bug. There's a spice in the scent, is it mustard stems maybe. Kingbird fluttering onto and off a fence wire, flashing yellow belly. Three blackbirds lit briefly next to him. It's chipping. Good binocs? - Pine too, brief thread of it. Joe's boots worn to the steel over his toes because he crawls a lot he said. Bulky man five years older than I am. The scent has a bit of euphoria in it. - Should say the sun is in silver sky, platinum - pewter, because it has a tarnished bloom. Is that her down there, I think, my solitary turkey. No a rock. Second silver car, is this one old Barbara. Driving too fast. 16 Wednesday night. I'm going for two or three weeks but I've been preparing as if it's months.
Big swallowtail over the west side shrubs this aft.
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